1. Technical Field
Embodiments of this disclosure generally relate to a backup management system and a backup management method, and more particularly to a technology for enabling a backup according to the cloud user's requirements without disclosing to the cloud user non-disclosed information of a cloud operator.
2. Related Art
Services that enable use of computer resources based on a network, particularly the Internet, called cloud services (hereinafter, “cloud”) are becoming widespread recently. A cloud user is allowed to access via the network a computer resource of a single or a plurality of clouds provided in the above manner to use the provided services.
As an example of use, there is a case where backup of data from a particular cloud to a different cloud is made. And to deal with such circumstances, there has been proposed a technology of, for example, mounting (corresponding) a storage area provided by the cloud to a storage area of the service user's terminal, and performing a data backup (copying) between two clouds using a copy function and the like performed by an Operating System (OS) (US-2010/0241731).
Among Open Source Software (OSS) and commercially available software, software other than the above have become available for allowing backup between clouds over the Internet.
As mentioned above, a cloud user can perform data backup between clouds using conventional technology. Meanwhile it is common for the cloud operator that provides the cloud to strictly limit the range of internal management information to be disclosed to the service user being an outsider in order to avoid various operational risks. For such reason, even if there were a demand for a cloud user to perform a specific backup based on such internal management information, it would be difficult to be carried out in the current situation where internal management information cannot be freely used.
As internal management information of the cloud operator that is not disclosed to the outsider, there is, for example, the position information of the data center (hereinafter, “DC”) where the computer resources physically exist. And the cloud user in this case would be performing backup operations without correctly holding the DC position so that a problem where both the backup source data and the backup destination data physically exist in the same DC may easily occur. When a DC failure occurs under this circumstance, data in both the backup source and backup destination cannot be accessed resulting in reducing the availability.
It is therefore an objective of the present invention to provide a technology that allows backup that meets the requirements of the cloud user without disclosing to the cloud user non-disclosed information of the cloud operator.